Knowledge shared by our community

Identifying the Many Faces of Tech Debt

Tech debt can have a negative impact on a product's development, such as slower productivity, slower feedback loops, large and slow release cycles, and more bugs. Management teams need predictability and stability, but tech debt can make this difficult. People can become frustrated with the product and engineers can burn out. To recognize tech debt, look for to-dos and fixme's in the code, copy paste code, spaghetti code, outdated tech stacks, slow tests, and slow build systems. To tackle tech debt, repayment, conversion, and acceptance are the three main areas. Tools like Sonar and Structure 101 can help with tracking progress.

Resolving Our Platform Stability Issues

Phorest, a platform, experienced serious scaling issues due to server exhaustion and database contention. To fix the stability issues, the company implemented an outage report format, investigated weaknesses in automation and deployment procedures, and took on a project called Darwin to improve the platform's stability, fault tolerance, and elasticity. The project was successful, resulting in a lower AWS bill and a more stable platform.

Good Developer / Bad Developer

This article outlines the traits and behaviours of good and bad software engineers, and the importance of having a great hiring process to ensure the right people are hired. Good developers are involved in feature design, understand their users, instrument, tune, and measure performance, are obsessed with learning, and put the team and organisation before themselves. Bad developers, on the other hand, are resistant to change, don't understand performance, and only care about their own work. The article also stresses the importance of firing bad developers.

Fixing a Broken Development Process

Phorest experienced a period of rapid growth which caused their system's performance to suffer and hosting costs to rise. To tackle the problem, they implemented a project called Darwin which included Continuous Integration, moving their deployment and infrastructure to Docker, automated testing, and shifting their development practices to a more collaborative approach. Additionally, they upgraded their systems and implemented monitoring, tooling, and system health. The results of the project were improved fault tolerance, elastic scalability, faster and easier deployments, and lower hosting costs. They learned the importance of building an environment of trust, taking risks, and saying no to features and customers.

Our Journey to Becoming Data-Driven

This article discusses the journey of a company to become data-driven. Actions taken included ensuring each department had the data they needed, finding a BI data tool, and getting data into the team's hands. Lessons learned included giving customer support teams pivots and the ability to grab their own data, helping the migrations team become more efficient, and discovering the capability to take on ambitious projects.

Introducing Agile and Story Points

An engineering team was resistant to changing their process due to previous negative experiences with Agile, but their software was not meeting stakeholder expectations. The team was slowly introduced to Agile concepts, such as daily 30 minute sit-downs and backlog grooming meetings. Story points were used for estimation of backlog grooming, and this helped bring up misunderstandings early on in the process. After a month, the team was able to release most of what had been developed, as it met stakeholder expectations and was bug free. This experience taught that some people have a negative association with Agile, so it is important to start slow and introduce the most valuable concepts first to get buy-in. Story points are an effective way to ensure alignment between PM, Dev, and QA.

Simultaneously Transitioning Two Offices from Waterfall to Agile

A consultant was brought in to roll out Agile to a 50 person engineering team across two offices. The consultant worked with the VP of Engineering and Product to develop pods aligned to business objectives, and then brought in a consultant to each office for 2 days of Scrum Master training. The consultant then provided coaching and guidance for each team for two months, and worked with the executive leadership team to set expectations around adoption and velocity. The lessons learned were that it is important to start with one team/pod that has practiced Agile before, and to roll out Agile to teams one at a time, allowing each team to adopt to Agile at their own pace. It is also important for all team members to have training and it's best if the team can do the training together.

Dividing a Product Engineering Sprint Team

In order to better manage resources and reduce overhead, an organization split their scrum team into two dedicated sprint teams. Each team was assigned a dedicated Product Manager and engineers were assigned based on skills and preferences. Projects were distributed to the lesser booked team to provide flexibility and balance, and the change resulted in improved productivity, visibility on resources, and better project planning.

User Testing to Minimize Time Spent on Arguing Conceptual Ideas

This article discusses the problem of multiple people across an organization having different opinions on how to best serve customers on key landing pages without data to support their assumptions. To solve this problem, the author used a subscription to UserTesting.com to run a series of studies to get feedback from perspective customers. Through this process, the author was able to inform stakeholders with qualitative data and learned lessons about the importance of user research, the value of time and money, and the importance of publishing study results.

At A New Organization Prioritization Is the First Step

This article discusses the problem of prioritization in a start-up with more appetite for innovation than team to complete them. The author outlines the actions taken to address the problem, such as understanding the company goals, assessing the expected outcome of the work, and creating a single forced rank list of the projects. The article also highlights the lessons learned, such as reframing the discussion from work to be done to outcomes to be achieved, and investing in understanding the work and the people.

Transitioning from a traditional company structure to progressive and customer-centric

This case study outlines the process of transitioning a large company with established processes to a customer-centric approach. This included revisiting strategies, implementing the Harvard Business Review "5 Questions to Building Strategy" model, and running lean start up workshops. The outcome was a cohesive and comprehensive strategy that enabled the company to get more funding and transition from feature-focused roadmaps to outcome-based roadmaps.

Adopting Agile

A company of 35 people needed to implement a process to continue growing, so they studied up on scrum and decided to go all the way with it. They co-located teams, held short and productive stand-ups, and monitored velocity, capacity, and output. As a result, they increased velocity from the same capacity, and surveys showed teams were happier, more engaged, and passionate about the product. They learned that to reap the benefits of an agile process, you have to go all the way.

Engineering Teams and Code Ownership: Take a Step Back and Think About the Big Picture

In order to ensure that everyone understands what is good code for the company, the engineering team created a set of engineering principles. These principles were based on research of other engineering teams and were tailored to the team's specific needs. The principles were introduced to the team and have since been used in discussions about design, operations, and other aspects of engineering. As a result, the quality of the code has improved and there is a common understanding of the team's work.

Growing Your Engineering Team: Creative Alternatives to Traditional Outsourcing

This article outlines the process of finding a partner to scale a team outside of a major tech hub. The author suggests creating a priority checklist to vet potential partners and establishing a partnership structure that allows the partner to be an extension of the existing team. The author also discusses the importance of building relationships with the partner and reiterating the importance of face-to-face interactions. The main takeaway is that the partnership needs to be continually managed and driven in order to be successful.

The Challenges of Being the Engineering Manager Hired In to Fix Existing Problems

A new manager may find themselves in a situation where they have inherited a team that is not performing at the expected level. It is important to listen to leadership, meet with the team, and do independent research to get to the ground truth. Possible scenarios include a lack of communication, inexperienced team members, or a toxic person. Ultimately, it is important to remember that people are hard and communication is key to resolving the issue.

Finding the Best Standup Setup for Your Team

The team was feeling stressed due to the time constraint of a critical project, so the manager discussed the company's goal and why the project was critical to ensure everyone was aligned. After discussing the team's stress, it was determined that too many meetings were interrupting their workflow, so the team agreed to have optional meetings, cancel some, and move to a virtual standup. After two weeks, the team reconvened to check if the change had reduced stress, and while some were happy with the change, others felt a lack of social interaction. To address this, the team agreed to have a weekly engineering meeting. The lesson learned was that each team is different and processes should be constantly checked and tuned to the current situation.

Building a collaborative roadmap and aligning priorities

GetNinjas, a local services marketplace in LATAM, faced the challenge of defining and prioritizing opportunities in their roadmap. To address this, they categorized opportunities into three buckets, made their roadmap public and accessible to anyone in the company using Notion.so, and encouraged everyone to read and comment on it. Despite a rough start, they have seen success in this new collaborative approach and will likely never go back to the traditional way of creating and communicating a roadmap.

How to transition from Professional Services to Product Management

After 8+ years of working as a professional services consultant, the author wanted to transition into product management. To prepare for this, they read blogs, spoke to PMs, read interview questions, created a resume, and applied to job postings. After failing at many interviews, they eventually succeeded and learned that there is a lot of tribal knowledge available, to apply to as many job postings as possible, and that there are no substitutes to the real test of interviews.

How do you know you are making the right product before you launch?

Product Managers (PMs) must have an expert level understanding of their target user and the problem they are trying to solve in order to create an MVP and launch a successful product. It is important to talk to customers in the environment that is contextual to the product and to have a CX touchpoint. Additionally, feedback should be gathered right away and usertesting.com can be used to validate concepts and UX decisions. Finally, PMs must consider how to scale the product if it is successful.

Being A New Manager On a Dispirited Team

A manager took over a troubled team with low morale and output. To build trust and start fixing the deeper issues, they had 1:1s with each team member, dealt with low hanging fruit issues, and fixed the scrum process. To deal with deeper issues, they built a career plan, roadmap, and an open and transparent environment. The two lessons learned were to listen to the team and build an environment for feedback.

Identifying the Many Faces of Tech Debt

Tech debt can have a negative impact on a product's development, such as slower productivity, slower feedback loops, large and slow release cycles, and more bugs. Management teams need predictability and stability, but tech debt can make this difficult. People can become frustrated with the product and engineers can burn out. To recognize tech debt, look for to-dos and fixme's in the code, copy paste code, spaghetti code, outdated tech stacks, slow tests, and slow build systems. To tackle tech debt, repayment, conversion, and acceptance are the three main areas. Tools like Sonar and Structure 101 can help with tracking progress.

Resolving Our Platform Stability Issues

Phorest, a platform, experienced serious scaling issues due to server exhaustion and database contention. To fix the stability issues, the company implemented an outage report format, investigated weaknesses in automation and deployment procedures, and took on a project called Darwin to improve the platform's stability, fault tolerance, and elasticity. The project was successful, resulting in a lower AWS bill and a more stable platform.

Good Developer / Bad Developer

This article outlines the traits and behaviours of good and bad software engineers, and the importance of having a great hiring process to ensure the right people are hired. Good developers are involved in feature design, understand their users, instrument, tune, and measure performance, are obsessed with learning, and put the team and organisation before themselves. Bad developers, on the other hand, are resistant to change, don't understand performance, and only care about their own work. The article also stresses the importance of firing bad developers.

Fixing a Broken Development Process

Phorest experienced a period of rapid growth which caused their system's performance to suffer and hosting costs to rise. To tackle the problem, they implemented a project called Darwin which included Continuous Integration, moving their deployment and infrastructure to Docker, automated testing, and shifting their development practices to a more collaborative approach. Additionally, they upgraded their systems and implemented monitoring, tooling, and system health. The results of the project were improved fault tolerance, elastic scalability, faster and easier deployments, and lower hosting costs. They learned the importance of building an environment of trust, taking risks, and saying no to features and customers.

Our Journey to Becoming Data-Driven

This article discusses the journey of a company to become data-driven. Actions taken included ensuring each department had the data they needed, finding a BI data tool, and getting data into the team's hands. Lessons learned included giving customer support teams pivots and the ability to grab their own data, helping the migrations team become more efficient, and discovering the capability to take on ambitious projects.

Introducing Agile and Story Points

An engineering team was resistant to changing their process due to previous negative experiences with Agile, but their software was not meeting stakeholder expectations. The team was slowly introduced to Agile concepts, such as daily 30 minute sit-downs and backlog grooming meetings. Story points were used for estimation of backlog grooming, and this helped bring up misunderstandings early on in the process. After a month, the team was able to release most of what had been developed, as it met stakeholder expectations and was bug free. This experience taught that some people have a negative association with Agile, so it is important to start slow and introduce the most valuable concepts first to get buy-in. Story points are an effective way to ensure alignment between PM, Dev, and QA.

Simultaneously Transitioning Two Offices from Waterfall to Agile

A consultant was brought in to roll out Agile to a 50 person engineering team across two offices. The consultant worked with the VP of Engineering and Product to develop pods aligned to business objectives, and then brought in a consultant to each office for 2 days of Scrum Master training. The consultant then provided coaching and guidance for each team for two months, and worked with the executive leadership team to set expectations around adoption and velocity. The lessons learned were that it is important to start with one team/pod that has practiced Agile before, and to roll out Agile to teams one at a time, allowing each team to adopt to Agile at their own pace. It is also important for all team members to have training and it's best if the team can do the training together.

Dividing a Product Engineering Sprint Team

In order to better manage resources and reduce overhead, an organization split their scrum team into two dedicated sprint teams. Each team was assigned a dedicated Product Manager and engineers were assigned based on skills and preferences. Projects were distributed to the lesser booked team to provide flexibility and balance, and the change resulted in improved productivity, visibility on resources, and better project planning.

User Testing to Minimize Time Spent on Arguing Conceptual Ideas

This article discusses the problem of multiple people across an organization having different opinions on how to best serve customers on key landing pages without data to support their assumptions. To solve this problem, the author used a subscription to UserTesting.com to run a series of studies to get feedback from perspective customers. Through this process, the author was able to inform stakeholders with qualitative data and learned lessons about the importance of user research, the value of time and money, and the importance of publishing study results.

At A New Organization Prioritization Is the First Step

This article discusses the problem of prioritization in a start-up with more appetite for innovation than team to complete them. The author outlines the actions taken to address the problem, such as understanding the company goals, assessing the expected outcome of the work, and creating a single forced rank list of the projects. The article also highlights the lessons learned, such as reframing the discussion from work to be done to outcomes to be achieved, and investing in understanding the work and the people.

Transitioning from a traditional company structure to progressive and customer-centric

This case study outlines the process of transitioning a large company with established processes to a customer-centric approach. This included revisiting strategies, implementing the Harvard Business Review "5 Questions to Building Strategy" model, and running lean start up workshops. The outcome was a cohesive and comprehensive strategy that enabled the company to get more funding and transition from feature-focused roadmaps to outcome-based roadmaps.

Adopting Agile

A company of 35 people needed to implement a process to continue growing, so they studied up on scrum and decided to go all the way with it. They co-located teams, held short and productive stand-ups, and monitored velocity, capacity, and output. As a result, they increased velocity from the same capacity, and surveys showed teams were happier, more engaged, and passionate about the product. They learned that to reap the benefits of an agile process, you have to go all the way.

Engineering Teams and Code Ownership: Take a Step Back and Think About the Big Picture

In order to ensure that everyone understands what is good code for the company, the engineering team created a set of engineering principles. These principles were based on research of other engineering teams and were tailored to the team's specific needs. The principles were introduced to the team and have since been used in discussions about design, operations, and other aspects of engineering. As a result, the quality of the code has improved and there is a common understanding of the team's work.

Growing Your Engineering Team: Creative Alternatives to Traditional Outsourcing

This article outlines the process of finding a partner to scale a team outside of a major tech hub. The author suggests creating a priority checklist to vet potential partners and establishing a partnership structure that allows the partner to be an extension of the existing team. The author also discusses the importance of building relationships with the partner and reiterating the importance of face-to-face interactions. The main takeaway is that the partnership needs to be continually managed and driven in order to be successful.

The Challenges of Being the Engineering Manager Hired In to Fix Existing Problems

A new manager may find themselves in a situation where they have inherited a team that is not performing at the expected level. It is important to listen to leadership, meet with the team, and do independent research to get to the ground truth. Possible scenarios include a lack of communication, inexperienced team members, or a toxic person. Ultimately, it is important to remember that people are hard and communication is key to resolving the issue.

Finding the Best Standup Setup for Your Team

The team was feeling stressed due to the time constraint of a critical project, so the manager discussed the company's goal and why the project was critical to ensure everyone was aligned. After discussing the team's stress, it was determined that too many meetings were interrupting their workflow, so the team agreed to have optional meetings, cancel some, and move to a virtual standup. After two weeks, the team reconvened to check if the change had reduced stress, and while some were happy with the change, others felt a lack of social interaction. To address this, the team agreed to have a weekly engineering meeting. The lesson learned was that each team is different and processes should be constantly checked and tuned to the current situation.

Building a collaborative roadmap and aligning priorities

GetNinjas, a local services marketplace in LATAM, faced the challenge of defining and prioritizing opportunities in their roadmap. To address this, they categorized opportunities into three buckets, made their roadmap public and accessible to anyone in the company using Notion.so, and encouraged everyone to read and comment on it. Despite a rough start, they have seen success in this new collaborative approach and will likely never go back to the traditional way of creating and communicating a roadmap.

How to transition from Professional Services to Product Management

After 8+ years of working as a professional services consultant, the author wanted to transition into product management. To prepare for this, they read blogs, spoke to PMs, read interview questions, created a resume, and applied to job postings. After failing at many interviews, they eventually succeeded and learned that there is a lot of tribal knowledge available, to apply to as many job postings as possible, and that there are no substitutes to the real test of interviews.

How do you know you are making the right product before you launch?

Product Managers (PMs) must have an expert level understanding of their target user and the problem they are trying to solve in order to create an MVP and launch a successful product. It is important to talk to customers in the environment that is contextual to the product and to have a CX touchpoint. Additionally, feedback should be gathered right away and usertesting.com can be used to validate concepts and UX decisions. Finally, PMs must consider how to scale the product if it is successful.

Being A New Manager On a Dispirited Team

A manager took over a troubled team with low morale and output. To build trust and start fixing the deeper issues, they had 1:1s with each team member, dealt with low hanging fruit issues, and fixed the scrum process. To deal with deeper issues, they built a career plan, roadmap, and an open and transparent environment. The two lessons learned were to listen to the team and build an environment for feedback.

Identifying the Many Faces of Tech Debt

Tech debt can have a negative impact on a product's development, such as slower productivity, slower feedback loops, large and slow release cycles, and more bugs. Management teams need predictability and stability, but tech debt can make this difficult. People can become frustrated with the product and engineers can burn out. To recognize tech debt, look for to-dos and fixme's in the code, copy paste code, spaghetti code, outdated tech stacks, slow tests, and slow build systems. To tackle tech debt, repayment, conversion, and acceptance are the three main areas. Tools like Sonar and Structure 101 can help with tracking progress.

Resolving Our Platform Stability Issues

Phorest, a platform, experienced serious scaling issues due to server exhaustion and database contention. To fix the stability issues, the company implemented an outage report format, investigated weaknesses in automation and deployment procedures, and took on a project called Darwin to improve the platform's stability, fault tolerance, and elasticity. The project was successful, resulting in a lower AWS bill and a more stable platform.

Good Developer / Bad Developer

This article outlines the traits and behaviours of good and bad software engineers, and the importance of having a great hiring process to ensure the right people are hired. Good developers are involved in feature design, understand their users, instrument, tune, and measure performance, are obsessed with learning, and put the team and organisation before themselves. Bad developers, on the other hand, are resistant to change, don't understand performance, and only care about their own work. The article also stresses the importance of firing bad developers.

Fixing a Broken Development Process

Phorest experienced a period of rapid growth which caused their system's performance to suffer and hosting costs to rise. To tackle the problem, they implemented a project called Darwin which included Continuous Integration, moving their deployment and infrastructure to Docker, automated testing, and shifting their development practices to a more collaborative approach. Additionally, they upgraded their systems and implemented monitoring, tooling, and system health. The results of the project were improved fault tolerance, elastic scalability, faster and easier deployments, and lower hosting costs. They learned the importance of building an environment of trust, taking risks, and saying no to features and customers.

Our Journey to Becoming Data-Driven

This article discusses the journey of a company to become data-driven. Actions taken included ensuring each department had the data they needed, finding a BI data tool, and getting data into the team's hands. Lessons learned included giving customer support teams pivots and the ability to grab their own data, helping the migrations team become more efficient, and discovering the capability to take on ambitious projects.

Introducing Agile and Story Points

An engineering team was resistant to changing their process due to previous negative experiences with Agile, but their software was not meeting stakeholder expectations. The team was slowly introduced to Agile concepts, such as daily 30 minute sit-downs and backlog grooming meetings. Story points were used for estimation of backlog grooming, and this helped bring up misunderstandings early on in the process. After a month, the team was able to release most of what had been developed, as it met stakeholder expectations and was bug free. This experience taught that some people have a negative association with Agile, so it is important to start slow and introduce the most valuable concepts first to get buy-in. Story points are an effective way to ensure alignment between PM, Dev, and QA.

Simultaneously Transitioning Two Offices from Waterfall to Agile

A consultant was brought in to roll out Agile to a 50 person engineering team across two offices. The consultant worked with the VP of Engineering and Product to develop pods aligned to business objectives, and then brought in a consultant to each office for 2 days of Scrum Master training. The consultant then provided coaching and guidance for each team for two months, and worked with the executive leadership team to set expectations around adoption and velocity. The lessons learned were that it is important to start with one team/pod that has practiced Agile before, and to roll out Agile to teams one at a time, allowing each team to adopt to Agile at their own pace. It is also important for all team members to have training and it's best if the team can do the training together.

Dividing a Product Engineering Sprint Team

In order to better manage resources and reduce overhead, an organization split their scrum team into two dedicated sprint teams. Each team was assigned a dedicated Product Manager and engineers were assigned based on skills and preferences. Projects were distributed to the lesser booked team to provide flexibility and balance, and the change resulted in improved productivity, visibility on resources, and better project planning.

User Testing to Minimize Time Spent on Arguing Conceptual Ideas

This article discusses the problem of multiple people across an organization having different opinions on how to best serve customers on key landing pages without data to support their assumptions. To solve this problem, the author used a subscription to UserTesting.com to run a series of studies to get feedback from perspective customers. Through this process, the author was able to inform stakeholders with qualitative data and learned lessons about the importance of user research, the value of time and money, and the importance of publishing study results.

At A New Organization Prioritization Is the First Step

This article discusses the problem of prioritization in a start-up with more appetite for innovation than team to complete them. The author outlines the actions taken to address the problem, such as understanding the company goals, assessing the expected outcome of the work, and creating a single forced rank list of the projects. The article also highlights the lessons learned, such as reframing the discussion from work to be done to outcomes to be achieved, and investing in understanding the work and the people.

Transitioning from a traditional company structure to progressive and customer-centric

This case study outlines the process of transitioning a large company with established processes to a customer-centric approach. This included revisiting strategies, implementing the Harvard Business Review "5 Questions to Building Strategy" model, and running lean start up workshops. The outcome was a cohesive and comprehensive strategy that enabled the company to get more funding and transition from feature-focused roadmaps to outcome-based roadmaps.

Adopting Agile

A company of 35 people needed to implement a process to continue growing, so they studied up on scrum and decided to go all the way with it. They co-located teams, held short and productive stand-ups, and monitored velocity, capacity, and output. As a result, they increased velocity from the same capacity, and surveys showed teams were happier, more engaged, and passionate about the product. They learned that to reap the benefits of an agile process, you have to go all the way.

Engineering Teams and Code Ownership: Take a Step Back and Think About the Big Picture

In order to ensure that everyone understands what is good code for the company, the engineering team created a set of engineering principles. These principles were based on research of other engineering teams and were tailored to the team's specific needs. The principles were introduced to the team and have since been used in discussions about design, operations, and other aspects of engineering. As a result, the quality of the code has improved and there is a common understanding of the team's work.

Growing Your Engineering Team: Creative Alternatives to Traditional Outsourcing

This article outlines the process of finding a partner to scale a team outside of a major tech hub. The author suggests creating a priority checklist to vet potential partners and establishing a partnership structure that allows the partner to be an extension of the existing team. The author also discusses the importance of building relationships with the partner and reiterating the importance of face-to-face interactions. The main takeaway is that the partnership needs to be continually managed and driven in order to be successful.

The Challenges of Being the Engineering Manager Hired In to Fix Existing Problems

A new manager may find themselves in a situation where they have inherited a team that is not performing at the expected level. It is important to listen to leadership, meet with the team, and do independent research to get to the ground truth. Possible scenarios include a lack of communication, inexperienced team members, or a toxic person. Ultimately, it is important to remember that people are hard and communication is key to resolving the issue.

Finding the Best Standup Setup for Your Team

The team was feeling stressed due to the time constraint of a critical project, so the manager discussed the company's goal and why the project was critical to ensure everyone was aligned. After discussing the team's stress, it was determined that too many meetings were interrupting their workflow, so the team agreed to have optional meetings, cancel some, and move to a virtual standup. After two weeks, the team reconvened to check if the change had reduced stress, and while some were happy with the change, others felt a lack of social interaction. To address this, the team agreed to have a weekly engineering meeting. The lesson learned was that each team is different and processes should be constantly checked and tuned to the current situation.

Building a collaborative roadmap and aligning priorities

GetNinjas, a local services marketplace in LATAM, faced the challenge of defining and prioritizing opportunities in their roadmap. To address this, they categorized opportunities into three buckets, made their roadmap public and accessible to anyone in the company using Notion.so, and encouraged everyone to read and comment on it. Despite a rough start, they have seen success in this new collaborative approach and will likely never go back to the traditional way of creating and communicating a roadmap.

How to transition from Professional Services to Product Management

After 8+ years of working as a professional services consultant, the author wanted to transition into product management. To prepare for this, they read blogs, spoke to PMs, read interview questions, created a resume, and applied to job postings. After failing at many interviews, they eventually succeeded and learned that there is a lot of tribal knowledge available, to apply to as many job postings as possible, and that there are no substitutes to the real test of interviews.

How do you know you are making the right product before you launch?

Product Managers (PMs) must have an expert level understanding of their target user and the problem they are trying to solve in order to create an MVP and launch a successful product. It is important to talk to customers in the environment that is contextual to the product and to have a CX touchpoint. Additionally, feedback should be gathered right away and usertesting.com can be used to validate concepts and UX decisions. Finally, PMs must consider how to scale the product if it is successful.

Being A New Manager On a Dispirited Team

A manager took over a troubled team with low morale and output. To build trust and start fixing the deeper issues, they had 1:1s with each team member, dealt with low hanging fruit issues, and fixed the scrum process. To deal with deeper issues, they built a career plan, roadmap, and an open and transparent environment. The two lessons learned were to listen to the team and build an environment for feedback.

Identifying the Many Faces of Tech Debt

Tech debt can have a negative impact on a product's development, such as slower productivity, slower feedback loops, large and slow release cycles, and more bugs. Management teams need predictability and stability, but tech debt can make this difficult. People can become frustrated with the product and engineers can burn out. To recognize tech debt, look for to-dos and fixme's in the code, copy paste code, spaghetti code, outdated tech stacks, slow tests, and slow build systems. To tackle tech debt, repayment, conversion, and acceptance are the three main areas. Tools like Sonar and Structure 101 can help with tracking progress.

Resolving Our Platform Stability Issues

Phorest, a platform, experienced serious scaling issues due to server exhaustion and database contention. To fix the stability issues, the company implemented an outage report format, investigated weaknesses in automation and deployment procedures, and took on a project called Darwin to improve the platform's stability, fault tolerance, and elasticity. The project was successful, resulting in a lower AWS bill and a more stable platform.

Good Developer / Bad Developer

This article outlines the traits and behaviours of good and bad software engineers, and the importance of having a great hiring process to ensure the right people are hired. Good developers are involved in feature design, understand their users, instrument, tune, and measure performance, are obsessed with learning, and put the team and organisation before themselves. Bad developers, on the other hand, are resistant to change, don't understand performance, and only care about their own work. The article also stresses the importance of firing bad developers.

Fixing a Broken Development Process

Phorest experienced a period of rapid growth which caused their system's performance to suffer and hosting costs to rise. To tackle the problem, they implemented a project called Darwin which included Continuous Integration, moving their deployment and infrastructure to Docker, automated testing, and shifting their development practices to a more collaborative approach. Additionally, they upgraded their systems and implemented monitoring, tooling, and system health. The results of the project were improved fault tolerance, elastic scalability, faster and easier deployments, and lower hosting costs. They learned the importance of building an environment of trust, taking risks, and saying no to features and customers.

Our Journey to Becoming Data-Driven

This article discusses the journey of a company to become data-driven. Actions taken included ensuring each department had the data they needed, finding a BI data tool, and getting data into the team's hands. Lessons learned included giving customer support teams pivots and the ability to grab their own data, helping the migrations team become more efficient, and discovering the capability to take on ambitious projects.

Introducing Agile and Story Points

An engineering team was resistant to changing their process due to previous negative experiences with Agile, but their software was not meeting stakeholder expectations. The team was slowly introduced to Agile concepts, such as daily 30 minute sit-downs and backlog grooming meetings. Story points were used for estimation of backlog grooming, and this helped bring up misunderstandings early on in the process. After a month, the team was able to release most of what had been developed, as it met stakeholder expectations and was bug free. This experience taught that some people have a negative association with Agile, so it is important to start slow and introduce the most valuable concepts first to get buy-in. Story points are an effective way to ensure alignment between PM, Dev, and QA.

Simultaneously Transitioning Two Offices from Waterfall to Agile

A consultant was brought in to roll out Agile to a 50 person engineering team across two offices. The consultant worked with the VP of Engineering and Product to develop pods aligned to business objectives, and then brought in a consultant to each office for 2 days of Scrum Master training. The consultant then provided coaching and guidance for each team for two months, and worked with the executive leadership team to set expectations around adoption and velocity. The lessons learned were that it is important to start with one team/pod that has practiced Agile before, and to roll out Agile to teams one at a time, allowing each team to adopt to Agile at their own pace. It is also important for all team members to have training and it's best if the team can do the training together.

Dividing a Product Engineering Sprint Team

In order to better manage resources and reduce overhead, an organization split their scrum team into two dedicated sprint teams. Each team was assigned a dedicated Product Manager and engineers were assigned based on skills and preferences. Projects were distributed to the lesser booked team to provide flexibility and balance, and the change resulted in improved productivity, visibility on resources, and better project planning.

User Testing to Minimize Time Spent on Arguing Conceptual Ideas

This article discusses the problem of multiple people across an organization having different opinions on how to best serve customers on key landing pages without data to support their assumptions. To solve this problem, the author used a subscription to UserTesting.com to run a series of studies to get feedback from perspective customers. Through this process, the author was able to inform stakeholders with qualitative data and learned lessons about the importance of user research, the value of time and money, and the importance of publishing study results.

At A New Organization Prioritization Is the First Step

This article discusses the problem of prioritization in a start-up with more appetite for innovation than team to complete them. The author outlines the actions taken to address the problem, such as understanding the company goals, assessing the expected outcome of the work, and creating a single forced rank list of the projects. The article also highlights the lessons learned, such as reframing the discussion from work to be done to outcomes to be achieved, and investing in understanding the work and the people.

Transitioning from a traditional company structure to progressive and customer-centric

This case study outlines the process of transitioning a large company with established processes to a customer-centric approach. This included revisiting strategies, implementing the Harvard Business Review "5 Questions to Building Strategy" model, and running lean start up workshops. The outcome was a cohesive and comprehensive strategy that enabled the company to get more funding and transition from feature-focused roadmaps to outcome-based roadmaps.

Adopting Agile

A company of 35 people needed to implement a process to continue growing, so they studied up on scrum and decided to go all the way with it. They co-located teams, held short and productive stand-ups, and monitored velocity, capacity, and output. As a result, they increased velocity from the same capacity, and surveys showed teams were happier, more engaged, and passionate about the product. They learned that to reap the benefits of an agile process, you have to go all the way.

Engineering Teams and Code Ownership: Take a Step Back and Think About the Big Picture

In order to ensure that everyone understands what is good code for the company, the engineering team created a set of engineering principles. These principles were based on research of other engineering teams and were tailored to the team's specific needs. The principles were introduced to the team and have since been used in discussions about design, operations, and other aspects of engineering. As a result, the quality of the code has improved and there is a common understanding of the team's work.

Growing Your Engineering Team: Creative Alternatives to Traditional Outsourcing

This article outlines the process of finding a partner to scale a team outside of a major tech hub. The author suggests creating a priority checklist to vet potential partners and establishing a partnership structure that allows the partner to be an extension of the existing team. The author also discusses the importance of building relationships with the partner and reiterating the importance of face-to-face interactions. The main takeaway is that the partnership needs to be continually managed and driven in order to be successful.

The Challenges of Being the Engineering Manager Hired In to Fix Existing Problems

A new manager may find themselves in a situation where they have inherited a team that is not performing at the expected level. It is important to listen to leadership, meet with the team, and do independent research to get to the ground truth. Possible scenarios include a lack of communication, inexperienced team members, or a toxic person. Ultimately, it is important to remember that people are hard and communication is key to resolving the issue.

Finding the Best Standup Setup for Your Team

The team was feeling stressed due to the time constraint of a critical project, so the manager discussed the company's goal and why the project was critical to ensure everyone was aligned. After discussing the team's stress, it was determined that too many meetings were interrupting their workflow, so the team agreed to have optional meetings, cancel some, and move to a virtual standup. After two weeks, the team reconvened to check if the change had reduced stress, and while some were happy with the change, others felt a lack of social interaction. To address this, the team agreed to have a weekly engineering meeting. The lesson learned was that each team is different and processes should be constantly checked and tuned to the current situation.

Building a collaborative roadmap and aligning priorities

GetNinjas, a local services marketplace in LATAM, faced the challenge of defining and prioritizing opportunities in their roadmap. To address this, they categorized opportunities into three buckets, made their roadmap public and accessible to anyone in the company using Notion.so, and encouraged everyone to read and comment on it. Despite a rough start, they have seen success in this new collaborative approach and will likely never go back to the traditional way of creating and communicating a roadmap.

How to transition from Professional Services to Product Management

After 8+ years of working as a professional services consultant, the author wanted to transition into product management. To prepare for this, they read blogs, spoke to PMs, read interview questions, created a resume, and applied to job postings. After failing at many interviews, they eventually succeeded and learned that there is a lot of tribal knowledge available, to apply to as many job postings as possible, and that there are no substitutes to the real test of interviews.

How do you know you are making the right product before you launch?

Product Managers (PMs) must have an expert level understanding of their target user and the problem they are trying to solve in order to create an MVP and launch a successful product. It is important to talk to customers in the environment that is contextual to the product and to have a CX touchpoint. Additionally, feedback should be gathered right away and usertesting.com can be used to validate concepts and UX decisions. Finally, PMs must consider how to scale the product if it is successful.

Being A New Manager On a Dispirited Team

A manager took over a troubled team with low morale and output. To build trust and start fixing the deeper issues, they had 1:1s with each team member, dealt with low hanging fruit issues, and fixed the scrum process. To deal with deeper issues, they built a career plan, roadmap, and an open and transparent environment. The two lessons learned were to listen to the team and build an environment for feedback.

Identifying the Many Faces of Tech Debt

Tech debt can have a negative impact on a product's development, such as slower productivity, slower feedback loops, large and slow release cycles, and more bugs. Management teams need predictability and stability, but tech debt can make this difficult. People can become frustrated with the product and engineers can burn out. To recognize tech debt, look for to-dos and fixme's in the code, copy paste code, spaghetti code, outdated tech stacks, slow tests, and slow build systems. To tackle tech debt, repayment, conversion, and acceptance are the three main areas. Tools like Sonar and Structure 101 can help with tracking progress.

Resolving Our Platform Stability Issues

Phorest, a platform, experienced serious scaling issues due to server exhaustion and database contention. To fix the stability issues, the company implemented an outage report format, investigated weaknesses in automation and deployment procedures, and took on a project called Darwin to improve the platform's stability, fault tolerance, and elasticity. The project was successful, resulting in a lower AWS bill and a more stable platform.

Good Developer / Bad Developer

This article outlines the traits and behaviours of good and bad software engineers, and the importance of having a great hiring process to ensure the right people are hired. Good developers are involved in feature design, understand their users, instrument, tune, and measure performance, are obsessed with learning, and put the team and organisation before themselves. Bad developers, on the other hand, are resistant to change, don't understand performance, and only care about their own work. The article also stresses the importance of firing bad developers.

Fixing a Broken Development Process

Phorest experienced a period of rapid growth which caused their system's performance to suffer and hosting costs to rise. To tackle the problem, they implemented a project called Darwin which included Continuous Integration, moving their deployment and infrastructure to Docker, automated testing, and shifting their development practices to a more collaborative approach. Additionally, they upgraded their systems and implemented monitoring, tooling, and system health. The results of the project were improved fault tolerance, elastic scalability, faster and easier deployments, and lower hosting costs. They learned the importance of building an environment of trust, taking risks, and saying no to features and customers.

Our Journey to Becoming Data-Driven

This article discusses the journey of a company to become data-driven. Actions taken included ensuring each department had the data they needed, finding a BI data tool, and getting data into the team's hands. Lessons learned included giving customer support teams pivots and the ability to grab their own data, helping the migrations team become more efficient, and discovering the capability to take on ambitious projects.

Introducing Agile and Story Points

An engineering team was resistant to changing their process due to previous negative experiences with Agile, but their software was not meeting stakeholder expectations. The team was slowly introduced to Agile concepts, such as daily 30 minute sit-downs and backlog grooming meetings. Story points were used for estimation of backlog grooming, and this helped bring up misunderstandings early on in the process. After a month, the team was able to release most of what had been developed, as it met stakeholder expectations and was bug free. This experience taught that some people have a negative association with Agile, so it is important to start slow and introduce the most valuable concepts first to get buy-in. Story points are an effective way to ensure alignment between PM, Dev, and QA.

Simultaneously Transitioning Two Offices from Waterfall to Agile

A consultant was brought in to roll out Agile to a 50 person engineering team across two offices. The consultant worked with the VP of Engineering and Product to develop pods aligned to business objectives, and then brought in a consultant to each office for 2 days of Scrum Master training. The consultant then provided coaching and guidance for each team for two months, and worked with the executive leadership team to set expectations around adoption and velocity. The lessons learned were that it is important to start with one team/pod that has practiced Agile before, and to roll out Agile to teams one at a time, allowing each team to adopt to Agile at their own pace. It is also important for all team members to have training and it's best if the team can do the training together.

Dividing a Product Engineering Sprint Team

In order to better manage resources and reduce overhead, an organization split their scrum team into two dedicated sprint teams. Each team was assigned a dedicated Product Manager and engineers were assigned based on skills and preferences. Projects were distributed to the lesser booked team to provide flexibility and balance, and the change resulted in improved productivity, visibility on resources, and better project planning.

User Testing to Minimize Time Spent on Arguing Conceptual Ideas

This article discusses the problem of multiple people across an organization having different opinions on how to best serve customers on key landing pages without data to support their assumptions. To solve this problem, the author used a subscription to UserTesting.com to run a series of studies to get feedback from perspective customers. Through this process, the author was able to inform stakeholders with qualitative data and learned lessons about the importance of user research, the value of time and money, and the importance of publishing study results.

At A New Organization Prioritization Is the First Step

This article discusses the problem of prioritization in a start-up with more appetite for innovation than team to complete them. The author outlines the actions taken to address the problem, such as understanding the company goals, assessing the expected outcome of the work, and creating a single forced rank list of the projects. The article also highlights the lessons learned, such as reframing the discussion from work to be done to outcomes to be achieved, and investing in understanding the work and the people.

Transitioning from a traditional company structure to progressive and customer-centric

This case study outlines the process of transitioning a large company with established processes to a customer-centric approach. This included revisiting strategies, implementing the Harvard Business Review "5 Questions to Building Strategy" model, and running lean start up workshops. The outcome was a cohesive and comprehensive strategy that enabled the company to get more funding and transition from feature-focused roadmaps to outcome-based roadmaps.

Adopting Agile

A company of 35 people needed to implement a process to continue growing, so they studied up on scrum and decided to go all the way with it. They co-located teams, held short and productive stand-ups, and monitored velocity, capacity, and output. As a result, they increased velocity from the same capacity, and surveys showed teams were happier, more engaged, and passionate about the product. They learned that to reap the benefits of an agile process, you have to go all the way.

Engineering Teams and Code Ownership: Take a Step Back and Think About the Big Picture

In order to ensure that everyone understands what is good code for the company, the engineering team created a set of engineering principles. These principles were based on research of other engineering teams and were tailored to the team's specific needs. The principles were introduced to the team and have since been used in discussions about design, operations, and other aspects of engineering. As a result, the quality of the code has improved and there is a common understanding of the team's work.

Growing Your Engineering Team: Creative Alternatives to Traditional Outsourcing

This article outlines the process of finding a partner to scale a team outside of a major tech hub. The author suggests creating a priority checklist to vet potential partners and establishing a partnership structure that allows the partner to be an extension of the existing team. The author also discusses the importance of building relationships with the partner and reiterating the importance of face-to-face interactions. The main takeaway is that the partnership needs to be continually managed and driven in order to be successful.

The Challenges of Being the Engineering Manager Hired In to Fix Existing Problems

A new manager may find themselves in a situation where they have inherited a team that is not performing at the expected level. It is important to listen to leadership, meet with the team, and do independent research to get to the ground truth. Possible scenarios include a lack of communication, inexperienced team members, or a toxic person. Ultimately, it is important to remember that people are hard and communication is key to resolving the issue.

Finding the Best Standup Setup for Your Team

The team was feeling stressed due to the time constraint of a critical project, so the manager discussed the company's goal and why the project was critical to ensure everyone was aligned. After discussing the team's stress, it was determined that too many meetings were interrupting their workflow, so the team agreed to have optional meetings, cancel some, and move to a virtual standup. After two weeks, the team reconvened to check if the change had reduced stress, and while some were happy with the change, others felt a lack of social interaction. To address this, the team agreed to have a weekly engineering meeting. The lesson learned was that each team is different and processes should be constantly checked and tuned to the current situation.

Building a collaborative roadmap and aligning priorities

GetNinjas, a local services marketplace in LATAM, faced the challenge of defining and prioritizing opportunities in their roadmap. To address this, they categorized opportunities into three buckets, made their roadmap public and accessible to anyone in the company using Notion.so, and encouraged everyone to read and comment on it. Despite a rough start, they have seen success in this new collaborative approach and will likely never go back to the traditional way of creating and communicating a roadmap.

How to transition from Professional Services to Product Management

After 8+ years of working as a professional services consultant, the author wanted to transition into product management. To prepare for this, they read blogs, spoke to PMs, read interview questions, created a resume, and applied to job postings. After failing at many interviews, they eventually succeeded and learned that there is a lot of tribal knowledge available, to apply to as many job postings as possible, and that there are no substitutes to the real test of interviews.

How do you know you are making the right product before you launch?

Product Managers (PMs) must have an expert level understanding of their target user and the problem they are trying to solve in order to create an MVP and launch a successful product. It is important to talk to customers in the environment that is contextual to the product and to have a CX touchpoint. Additionally, feedback should be gathered right away and usertesting.com can be used to validate concepts and UX decisions. Finally, PMs must consider how to scale the product if it is successful.

Being A New Manager On a Dispirited Team

A manager took over a troubled team with low morale and output. To build trust and start fixing the deeper issues, they had 1:1s with each team member, dealt with low hanging fruit issues, and fixed the scrum process. To deal with deeper issues, they built a career plan, roadmap, and an open and transparent environment. The two lessons learned were to listen to the team and build an environment for feedback.

Identifying the Many Faces of Tech Debt

Tech debt can have a negative impact on a product's development, such as slower productivity, slower feedback loops, large and slow release cycles, and more bugs. Management teams need predictability and stability, but tech debt can make this difficult. People can become frustrated with the product and engineers can burn out. To recognize tech debt, look for to-dos and fixme's in the code, copy paste code, spaghetti code, outdated tech stacks, slow tests, and slow build systems. To tackle tech debt, repayment, conversion, and acceptance are the three main areas. Tools like Sonar and Structure 101 can help with tracking progress.

Resolving Our Platform Stability Issues

Phorest, a platform, experienced serious scaling issues due to server exhaustion and database contention. To fix the stability issues, the company implemented an outage report format, investigated weaknesses in automation and deployment procedures, and took on a project called Darwin to improve the platform's stability, fault tolerance, and elasticity. The project was successful, resulting in a lower AWS bill and a more stable platform.

Good Developer / Bad Developer

This article outlines the traits and behaviours of good and bad software engineers, and the importance of having a great hiring process to ensure the right people are hired. Good developers are involved in feature design, understand their users, instrument, tune, and measure performance, are obsessed with learning, and put the team and organisation before themselves. Bad developers, on the other hand, are resistant to change, don't understand performance, and only care about their own work. The article also stresses the importance of firing bad developers.

Fixing a Broken Development Process

Phorest experienced a period of rapid growth which caused their system's performance to suffer and hosting costs to rise. To tackle the problem, they implemented a project called Darwin which included Continuous Integration, moving their deployment and infrastructure to Docker, automated testing, and shifting their development practices to a more collaborative approach. Additionally, they upgraded their systems and implemented monitoring, tooling, and system health. The results of the project were improved fault tolerance, elastic scalability, faster and easier deployments, and lower hosting costs. They learned the importance of building an environment of trust, taking risks, and saying no to features and customers.

Our Journey to Becoming Data-Driven

This article discusses the journey of a company to become data-driven. Actions taken included ensuring each department had the data they needed, finding a BI data tool, and getting data into the team's hands. Lessons learned included giving customer support teams pivots and the ability to grab their own data, helping the migrations team become more efficient, and discovering the capability to take on ambitious projects.

Introducing Agile and Story Points

An engineering team was resistant to changing their process due to previous negative experiences with Agile, but their software was not meeting stakeholder expectations. The team was slowly introduced to Agile concepts, such as daily 30 minute sit-downs and backlog grooming meetings. Story points were used for estimation of backlog grooming, and this helped bring up misunderstandings early on in the process. After a month, the team was able to release most of what had been developed, as it met stakeholder expectations and was bug free. This experience taught that some people have a negative association with Agile, so it is important to start slow and introduce the most valuable concepts first to get buy-in. Story points are an effective way to ensure alignment between PM, Dev, and QA.

Simultaneously Transitioning Two Offices from Waterfall to Agile

A consultant was brought in to roll out Agile to a 50 person engineering team across two offices. The consultant worked with the VP of Engineering and Product to develop pods aligned to business objectives, and then brought in a consultant to each office for 2 days of Scrum Master training. The consultant then provided coaching and guidance for each team for two months, and worked with the executive leadership team to set expectations around adoption and velocity. The lessons learned were that it is important to start with one team/pod that has practiced Agile before, and to roll out Agile to teams one at a time, allowing each team to adopt to Agile at their own pace. It is also important for all team members to have training and it's best if the team can do the training together.

Dividing a Product Engineering Sprint Team

In order to better manage resources and reduce overhead, an organization split their scrum team into two dedicated sprint teams. Each team was assigned a dedicated Product Manager and engineers were assigned based on skills and preferences. Projects were distributed to the lesser booked team to provide flexibility and balance, and the change resulted in improved productivity, visibility on resources, and better project planning.

User Testing to Minimize Time Spent on Arguing Conceptual Ideas

This article discusses the problem of multiple people across an organization having different opinions on how to best serve customers on key landing pages without data to support their assumptions. To solve this problem, the author used a subscription to UserTesting.com to run a series of studies to get feedback from perspective customers. Through this process, the author was able to inform stakeholders with qualitative data and learned lessons about the importance of user research, the value of time and money, and the importance of publishing study results.

At A New Organization Prioritization Is the First Step

This article discusses the problem of prioritization in a start-up with more appetite for innovation than team to complete them. The author outlines the actions taken to address the problem, such as understanding the company goals, assessing the expected outcome of the work, and creating a single forced rank list of the projects. The article also highlights the lessons learned, such as reframing the discussion from work to be done to outcomes to be achieved, and investing in understanding the work and the people.

Transitioning from a traditional company structure to progressive and customer-centric

This case study outlines the process of transitioning a large company with established processes to a customer-centric approach. This included revisiting strategies, implementing the Harvard Business Review "5 Questions to Building Strategy" model, and running lean start up workshops. The outcome was a cohesive and comprehensive strategy that enabled the company to get more funding and transition from feature-focused roadmaps to outcome-based roadmaps.

Adopting Agile

A company of 35 people needed to implement a process to continue growing, so they studied up on scrum and decided to go all the way with it. They co-located teams, held short and productive stand-ups, and monitored velocity, capacity, and output. As a result, they increased velocity from the same capacity, and surveys showed teams were happier, more engaged, and passionate about the product. They learned that to reap the benefits of an agile process, you have to go all the way.

Engineering Teams and Code Ownership: Take a Step Back and Think About the Big Picture

In order to ensure that everyone understands what is good code for the company, the engineering team created a set of engineering principles. These principles were based on research of other engineering teams and were tailored to the team's specific needs. The principles were introduced to the team and have since been used in discussions about design, operations, and other aspects of engineering. As a result, the quality of the code has improved and there is a common understanding of the team's work.

Growing Your Engineering Team: Creative Alternatives to Traditional Outsourcing

This article outlines the process of finding a partner to scale a team outside of a major tech hub. The author suggests creating a priority checklist to vet potential partners and establishing a partnership structure that allows the partner to be an extension of the existing team. The author also discusses the importance of building relationships with the partner and reiterating the importance of face-to-face interactions. The main takeaway is that the partnership needs to be continually managed and driven in order to be successful.

The Challenges of Being the Engineering Manager Hired In to Fix Existing Problems

A new manager may find themselves in a situation where they have inherited a team that is not performing at the expected level. It is important to listen to leadership, meet with the team, and do independent research to get to the ground truth. Possible scenarios include a lack of communication, inexperienced team members, or a toxic person. Ultimately, it is important to remember that people are hard and communication is key to resolving the issue.

Finding the Best Standup Setup for Your Team

The team was feeling stressed due to the time constraint of a critical project, so the manager discussed the company's goal and why the project was critical to ensure everyone was aligned. After discussing the team's stress, it was determined that too many meetings were interrupting their workflow, so the team agreed to have optional meetings, cancel some, and move to a virtual standup. After two weeks, the team reconvened to check if the change had reduced stress, and while some were happy with the change, others felt a lack of social interaction. To address this, the team agreed to have a weekly engineering meeting. The lesson learned was that each team is different and processes should be constantly checked and tuned to the current situation.

Building a collaborative roadmap and aligning priorities

GetNinjas, a local services marketplace in LATAM, faced the challenge of defining and prioritizing opportunities in their roadmap. To address this, they categorized opportunities into three buckets, made their roadmap public and accessible to anyone in the company using Notion.so, and encouraged everyone to read and comment on it. Despite a rough start, they have seen success in this new collaborative approach and will likely never go back to the traditional way of creating and communicating a roadmap.

How to transition from Professional Services to Product Management

After 8+ years of working as a professional services consultant, the author wanted to transition into product management. To prepare for this, they read blogs, spoke to PMs, read interview questions, created a resume, and applied to job postings. After failing at many interviews, they eventually succeeded and learned that there is a lot of tribal knowledge available, to apply to as many job postings as possible, and that there are no substitutes to the real test of interviews.

How do you know you are making the right product before you launch?

Product Managers (PMs) must have an expert level understanding of their target user and the problem they are trying to solve in order to create an MVP and launch a successful product. It is important to talk to customers in the environment that is contextual to the product and to have a CX touchpoint. Additionally, feedback should be gathered right away and usertesting.com can be used to validate concepts and UX decisions. Finally, PMs must consider how to scale the product if it is successful.

Being A New Manager On a Dispirited Team

A manager took over a troubled team with low morale and output. To build trust and start fixing the deeper issues, they had 1:1s with each team member, dealt with low hanging fruit issues, and fixed the scrum process. To deal with deeper issues, they built a career plan, roadmap, and an open and transparent environment. The two lessons learned were to listen to the team and build an environment for feedback.